Exploratory or Background Research
Stephanie Ojeda Ponce
Developing a quality research projects takes a bit of research!
Doing a search to gather basic information about a topic can help you understand what people have written and are writing. For professional writers and researchers, this step is important because their proposals or projects may not be supported or funded if somebody else already did the same or even a similar project. For students doing early research, this step helps you understand what information is available, and how scholars and professional writers talk about a topic. You can start identifying common terms, phrases, authors, or experiments.
Digital Library Searches
- Search pro & con database pages that list multiple sources and points of view about topics.
- Search the Gale database, especially the Subject Guide Search or Topic Finder.
- Search on the Highline library homepage. Watch the two minute One Search Tutorial video for tips.
Encyclopedia Research
- Search your topic in Encyclopedias and Wikipedia to make sure you know definitions for related terms and important events or organizations
Subject Terms & Key Words
As you are conducting searches, read or skim for repeated words. Look for tags, subject terms, related subjects and similar headings. Finding out the way published writing talks about what you have in mind is the key to unlocking useful search results.
Browser Search
Using Google, Duck Duck Go or whatever browser you prefer, run some basic searches to see popular results about the subject. Browser results are heavily biased and individual. The browsers will mainly show you results relevant to other searches you have made, and what it is programmed to show you as a result of that. Things such as political articles you’ve read, purchases you’ve made, social media you use , and things you’ve talked about around your phone or voice assistants, influence the search results you see. Searches are also impacted by human bias and that the people that constructed these systems have similar areas of expertise. We’ll talk more about algorithmic bias later, but for now, it’s important to be skeptical about the results.
- Try Google Scholar to see more book and academic writing results.
- Try using filters to show .gov or .edu websites only
The video below makes suggestions for using Google Scholar.
Social Media and Online Forums
Many influential scholars use the social media website formerly known as Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, Discord, or other community and private forums to talk about their ideas and developing research. It’s common for graduate students, students with bachelor’s degrees in school working on masters or doctoral degrees, to create accounts specifically to connect with other graduate students in their discipline, subject matter. If you already use one of these sites, consider searching for relevant communities.
For the social media site formerly known as Twitter, the hashtag or pound sign is used to link tweets about a particular topic or field.
